Character Study
by damalur
Summary: Ariadne, after the top falls.  Arthur/Ariadne, oneshot.


He hands her in and out of cars. Just—steps out, turns, offers her his hand, nothing more casual than brushing a spray of dust off the shoulder of one of his too-tailored suitcoats.

She gets nothing more from him than that. He holds the door for her, he talks business, he offers her his hand casually, dismissively; where he goes in between jobs she doesn't know and, for all that she could invade Cobb's lowest levels, she doesn't ask. Where he goes in between jobs, she doesn't follow.

Spring. She graduates. She spends the day with her aunt and uncle, her little sister—not so little, now, about to start college herself—she spends the night with her friends, wandering the streets with a cheap bottle of wine. Some thoughtful person leaves a spray of cut flowers on her first-floor windowsill, meticulously arranged and tied with a lavender ribbon. She knows more about the Mongol-Tartar raids of the thirteenth century than she does about botany, so—rather than logging on to her computer—she hauls herself to the university library for the last time. The book, thicker than her arm, tells her the flowers are poppies, which makes her laugh and fight against a flicker of worry. Dorothy in the poppy fields. Meticulous.

Summer, she goes to Italy. Takes only a backpack, four changes of clothes, and a copy of _Europe on Five Dollars a Day_ that used to belong to her father. "Five dollars won't get you from one side of Paris to the other, the way you eat," he used to tell her, "but here, Ari, you can at least look at the pictures." And she had: Paris, Rome, Berlin, the Eiffel Tower, La Scala, Brunelleschi's dome, the cathedral at Worms, again and again and again until the cover wore thin like newspaper. The maps are still mostly accurate, if nothing else.

At night, she hones her craft. And—

Her father was right about the five dollars, but she has the rest of her cut from the Fischer job. Come fall, she won't bother sending out the same spate of resumes as her classmates; there is nothing like her job in _this_ world.

* * *

She moves stateside, this time to Boston. Eames is living in New York with Yusuf, Dom is—Dom is clearly out of the game, off...where? She imagines Kansas, Iowa, somewhere with sheaves of golden wheat and a certain quality of light; Professor Reynolds said it was the architect's obsession in her, that preoccupation.

Ariadne picks Boston, close enough to commute but far enough away to not feel cramped by her work. She doesn't know where Arthur lives, and doesn't ask.

October, their first post-reunion job, and they meet quietly at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Midtown. Eames suggested the location—what they do is not strictly illegal, but not strictly known to be _possible_—and Ariadne stifles a smirk when she catches Arthur inspecting the dubious cleanliness of his silverware. She orders nachos, spinach-artichoke dip, a cheeseburger, and a pint of beer, and has to remind herself to swallow before she talks. The guacamole is unrivaled by anything Europe can produce.

"So," she says, "what's the job?"

"Corporate espionage," Arthur says. She must make a face, because—corporate espionage?

"You have a problem with that?" he asks. Eames snorts into his Mai Tai.

"No! No, I just, it seems so—" She gestures skyward with her fork. "Mundane?"

"It's a job. It pays," Arthur says, as if she somehow missed that fact. Right now, right now she's missing the guy who stole a kiss.

"In Altarian dollars?" she jokes, licking a smear of cheese off the back of one finger.

"In Euros," he says.

"It was a—you know what? Never mind," she says, and turns to watch as Yusuf dumps a seventh packet of salt into his water. The Arthur that visited her in Italy, the Arthur that watched as she tipped her bishop over and over again and never saw it fall, that Arthur would laugh at her jokes. This Arthur tips his lips up, as required; she wants to smear guacamole in his hair.

That Arthur stole a kiss, but she supposes he can be forgiven. Lives were on the line. Liberties were given.

This Arthur holds her coat for her as they leave. If he sends any more mixed signals, she's hiring Eames and Yusuf to do an extraction.

* * *

Ten months ago, corporate espionage would've turned her stomach; now she can think of nothing but the blueprints of her subconscious. Their target is David Marquardt, of Microsoft fame. Arthur coordinates the effort, researches the mark, does the preliminary footwork. She takes him into her construction and makes a ham-handed attempt at flirting with him as she guides him through the levels.

In school, she was always...in school. Focused on her schoolwork. She had her graduate degree, from a foreign university, even, by the time her high school classmates were finishing their undergraduate work. As a child, teachers called her "precocious," which in this reality means she can tell Romanesque architecture from Byzantine at two hundred paces, but has less applied experience when it comes to flirting.

It's so _ordinary_. She gets bored with it, a little, especially when he doesn't respond. Elegant, eloquent—can the lines of his body speak? She thinks they can—always six moves ahead of their little band, and although she knows he prescience is due to research, he makes it seem as if the information springs fully-formed from his head. She gets bored with the flirting, so she asks him questions about himself, leads him along the raised walkway overlooking the gardens (things she _did_ conjure, fully-formed, from her mind) and asks him the hows and the whys.

Conversationally, he stumbles. "I'm good at it, I guess," he says. "I don't have some grand artistic motive they way you or Dom do." They pass over the river, the paper boats, the spray of cherry trees on the bank she included in memory of Saito. Ariadne slides her palm over the cast iron of the railing and wonders if she could recreate it in a more delicate material: glass, maybe, or silk.

"Eames says you have no imagination," she reports.

"I imagine he's right," Arthur says.

It startles a laugh out of her. Her laughter is easy to startle. Together they stroll along the walkway, above the gardens, below the gardens. She watches his face out of the corner of her eye as the world reorients itself. As always, his reaction is subtle on the surface and layered so deep she thinks they would need nine dreams or ten dreams or twelve to wrest any secret from _his_ head.

They pass under the river, the paper boats, the spray of cherry trees on the bank. The landscape turns less sculpted; they pass under a field of wildflowers.

"Is that really a good enough reason to do it, though?" she asks. "I mean, do you ever wonder?"

"About the morality?" Arthur asks.

"Sure." She shrugs. "The morality, or the sanity of it. We kill each other for practice, doesn't that strike you as a little unhealthy?"

They pass over the river, the paper boats, the spray of cherry trees. The landscape turns less sculpted; they pass over a field of wildflowers.

"Oh look," Arthur says. "Poppies."


End file.
